Category: Film Review

Food. What was once an abundant, cherished source of nutrition and spirit has been turned into a cold, destructive big business by those looking to profit wildly by exploiting a necessity. The ambitious documentary “Food, Inc.” seeks to cover the wide range of food ills and agrarian perversions, hopeful to showcase a growing corporate movement that’s removed the purity of consumption to turn a fast buck, using abusive attitudes, fallible safety precautions, and unhealthy ingredients to keep the food flowing.

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I’m just going to quietly regard the 2006 feature “School for Scoundrels” as a bad dream. While shooting itself in the foot with a cast of such world-renown, gut-bustin’ jesters like Billy Bob Thornton and Jon Heder, “Scoundrels” more importantly wasted the talents of director Todd Phillips in a major way, casting serious doubts on his developing abilities as an ace comedic filmmaker. “The Hangover” restores faith in Phillips and the vulgar passions of the R-rated comedy, assembling a smutty epic of irresponsibility that handles with a certain amount of routine, but still delivers huge on laughs and knowing cringes.

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Running from 1974 to 1976, Sid and Marty Krofft’s “Land of the Lost” television series seized the imagination of a generation tickled to travel to far off dimensions, populated by the finest creatures a five-dollar production budget could buy. Far be it from me to pooh-pooh the ravenous nostalgia of others, but “Lost” was also borderline unwatchable; a glacially executed kids show that appeared more interested in locating creative ways to stall for 22 minutes than pursuing the more fantastical fringes of its own fantasia. Now comedy kingpin Will Ferrell steps up to the plate to reimagine “Lost” as a slickly budgeted, thrill-a-minute summer extravaganza, and while the film cheerfully dusts off Sleestaks, Chakas, and roaring dinosaurs to enchant the faithful, it seems the new film somehow lost access to an adequate script along the way.

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When Nia Vardalos broke out of obscurity with 2002’s sleeper smash “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” it was cause for a celebration. Vardalos triumphantly beat the industry odds, manufacturing a legitimately lovely romantic comedy stewed in the juices of Greek culture, gradually surviving the weekly multiplex onslaughts to become a top-grossing phenomenon. The film even earned her an Oscar nomination for screenwriting. How’s that for a miracle? After the heat died down, Vardalos segued into the hospitable 2004 drag queen comedy “Connie and Carla.” It tanked. So, five years later, Vardalos has booked a return flight to Greece with “My Life in Ruins,” a film so agonizingly devoid of intelligence, inspiration, and surprise, it makes “Big Fat Greek Wedding” stand out as a now loathsome fluke.

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Last winter, director Sam Mendes probed the ghoulish shades of marital woe with “Revolutionary Road,” a bracing, bitter pill of a drama that sternly underlined the fury of decayed commitment. “Away We Go,” debuting only a mere seven months after “Road,” takes a much kinder observational post. A story of a struggling relationship on the verge of solidifying through addition, “Away We Go” aims to humanize the universal fears of parenthood and commitment, using the structure of a road trip comedy to alleviate the suffocation that would normally squeeze tight a tale of domestic doubt. It’s Mendes attempting to lighten up his oeuvre, and the newly awakened tenderness suits him just fine.

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“The Limits of Control” is an imposing spread of baffling puzzle pieces without any box art to employ as a guide to completion. The film demands attention on a marathon scale, yet rewards the intensive effort with copious amounts of abstraction and confusion, without ever inviting the viewer into this strange world of staring, contemplation, more staring, existentialism, and painfully elongated idiosyncrasy. Writer/director Jim Jarmusch has lumbered down this road of premeditated obscurity before, but never this ineffectively. “Control” is trying much too hard to play it perfectly cool.

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A frothy brew of “The Sting,” “Bottle Rocket,” and Dr. Seuss, Rian Johnson’s “The Brothers Bloom” has its cheating heart in the right place. A twisty cinematic con game keen to stay one swindling step ahead of the audience, “Bloom” can be a dense, complicated puzzle of faces and places, with Johnson toiling away to preserve a fresh perspective on a horde of highly rusted screen clichés. However, his lube of choice is whimsy, and as the filmmaker pours an endless stream of cutesy behaviors and larger-than-life screenwriting into the stew, “Brothers Bloom” eventually curdles altogether, leaving an overcooked shell game aggressively trying to pass itself off as delightfully quirky fixins for the horn-rimmed, organic-brew crowd.

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After the 1993 release of “Army of Darkness,” fans of director Sam Raimi clamored for a fourth entry in his adored “Evil Dead” series of horror bonanzas. “Drag Me to Hell” is the filmmaker’s first meaty scare effort since he sauntered off to make the blockbuster “Spider-Man” trilogy, but it might as well be subtitled “The Evil Dead Film You’ve Been Waiting For.” A wicked, highly stylized fright flick, “Drag” brings out the good-humored Sam Raimi we all know and love, allowing him a devilish playground to reawaken his rascally spirit sufficiently mummified by the big-league, big-buck “Spider-Man” features. Raimi hasn’t lost his touch in the years since he last galloped into screwball scares, and “Drag” is an awesome reminder that when unchained, he can still deliver the finest, wettest, slyest entertainment around.

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Magnified with the type of divine emotional majesty few animation spectacles could ever hope to reach, Disney/Pixar’s “Up” is a triumphant masterstroke for the studio and their Teflon reputation. Declining the red-carpet invitation to manufacture mawkish, feebly scripted pathos, “Up” instead aims for and achieves a splendid merger of heartache and soaring spirituality. For their 10th motion picture, the Pixar squad has hit pay dirt yet again, only with “Up,” the production team manages to weave together whimsy and poignancy in a visually dazzling, high-flying marvel of an adventure. Conceptually, it’s not a trailblazer, but the execution is perhaps Pixar’s most confident and irresistibly moving since their 1995 masterpiece, “Toy Story.”

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This being the second go-around with the “Night at the Museum” franchise, it’s clear to me that laughs shouldn’t be the focal point of the material. With all these fantastical events occurring within a cherished educational playground, it feels like a major directorial failure to pursue dollar-store jokes when there’s so much adventure to be had. “Battle of the Smithsonian” has the advantage of hindsight over its ramshackle 2006 forefather, yet it only occasionally lives up to its wondrous, chaotic premise. Instead the film appears more delighted with tiresome improvisational acrobatics than generating a welcoming tidal wave of wonder.

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What I’m about to write isn’t a recommendation of the new parody film “Dance Flick,” but more of a gentle warning that what the Wayans Brothers are serving up here isn’t nearly as wrist-slittingly disgraceful as expected. We’re still miles away from the bellylaugh miracles of the golden “Airplane!” and “Naked Gun” era, but “Dance Flick” has an appealing concentration on zany that’s eluded fellow yuksters such as Friedman/Seltzer and even David Zucker in recent years. Again, this is not a recommendation. More a blazing “all clear” signal flare to those partial to a little brainless comedy on occasion.

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The droll poise of playwright Noel Coward is returned to the screen in Stephen Elliot’s “Easy Virtue.” A firecracker of a period comedy brought to life by some of today’s most elegant actors, “Virtue” possesses marvelous edge, wit, and pace, yet this latest incarnation of the 1924 play should be defined by one single, utterly shocking element: Jessica Biel. Turns out the young lady can act some, keeping up with the tempo of this culture comedy like seasoned pro.

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2003’s “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” was a frivolous entry in this brutal saga of man vs. machine, but it retained a suitably metallic scent of James Cameron’s original creation, and offered audiences a sucker punch of a doomsday ending, placing a respectable capper on a franchise that never bothered to plan too far ahead. We’re now confronted with “Terminator Salvation” because Hollywood is stuck in the “rebooting” phase of its history, scouring the vaults for once high-profile material it can reshape and resell to a public hungry for familiarity. Not unexpectedly, the Cameron-less “Salvation” is another trembling step backwards for this once persuasive series of time-traveling adventures, crafted by a filmmaker I was hoping could lead the charge and take the franchise in a whole new direction.

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Light the torches and sharpen the pitchforks, I enjoyed “The Da Vinci Code.” While long-winded, Ron Howard’s version of the Dan Brown best-seller provided a lovingly smothering mood of daredevil exposition and for-fans-only historical minutiae. Even if I didn’t seize the scholarly passion burning behind the dialogue or comprehend the larger religious misconduct of the plot, I enjoyed the cinematic bluster of the work and appreciated how Howard took the time to preserve the experience for the fanatics. Plus, a heaping dose of star power from the stately Tom Hanks never hurts, unless Nora Ephron is directing. “Angels & Demons” rolls up to bat three years after “Code” stormed the box office, and while Howard’s promise of a snappier pace is kept, it’s hard to sense much of a seismic difference between the two films. But that’s fine by me.

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A little over a year ago, the simplistic, heart-tugging immigration drama “Under the Same Moon” opened in theaters, pouring honey and tears over the complicated subject of hazardous Mexican border crossing. While not explicitly a story of migration, the drama “Sin Nombre” boldly assumes a bleaker perspective of Mexican and South American individuals who seek the comfort of America any way they can find it. It’s one of many captivating, searing depictions of fear in this unflinching, outstanding debut feature film from director Cary Fukunaga.

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“Management” should come equipped with some type of safety restraint to best absorb the shock of all the uncomfortable tonal changes that continually derail the film. A romantic comedy that’s eager to make a commitment to its characters, yet never takes anything seriously, “Management” is only tolerable in small fragments of performance and laughs. As a whole, it doesn’t know what to do with itself, preferring to wander around blindly in search of a dramatic core instead of actively seeking one.

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It seems these days every genre film wants to add a pinch of verisimilitude to their diet, searching to find a fresh take on antique thrills. “Big Man Japan” aims to rework the gravity of the monster movie, looking to create a world where not only monsters are real, but the man sent to battle them has terrible domestic problems, surrounded by a populace that would rather see him quit. Director/star Hitoshi Matsumoto’s graceful satire “Big Man Japan” is a viewing experience akin to a leisurely acid trip, but it’s also one of the more original, surprising visions of the year.

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In the opening section of the indie “The Big Shot-Caller,” there’s a suggestion that the material will swiftly transform into an underdog dance story, resting comfortably in the arms of cliché to win over the most audience members. It’s to the film’s credit that this familiarity doesn’t really surface for a good 60 minutes. The bad news is that “Shot-Caller” eschews tradition to summon its own quirky music, and in the hands of inexperienced filmmaker Marlene Rhein, the challenge to form a cohesive feature-length motion picture proves to be too large a task.

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120 minutes of unrelenting goose bumps.

An artistic blood transfusion of immaculate execution, the new “Star Trek” boldly goes straight to the senses, providing a full-throated rush of operatic sci-fi, cleverly conceived characterizations, and a swarm of franchise homages and surprises that take incredible care of the brand name’s impossible 44-year-long pop culture reign, while forging firm new ground for those who couldn’t tell Kirk from Spock with a gun to their head. Director J.J. Abrams has achieved what many thought to be impossible, reaching bare-handed into the venomous depths of absurdly rigid canon, pulling together a sublime space adventure that flies as confidently and triumphantly as “Trek” ever has before. It’s not only a victorious series highlight, but perhaps one of the best pictures of the year.

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Samantha: You don’t know anything about me.
Pastor John: I can see you’re in pain.
Samantha: I’m alive.
Pastor John: Is that how you see life?
Samantha: Until farts taste like cherries…yeah.
Corey: What do you think God’s farts taste like?
Samantha: Marshmallow Peeps.

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